But the design deemed best in show, the winner of the accolade ‘design of the year’, is something that many had given up all hope of reinventing: the UK government’s approach to information technology.

How many billions of pounds have been wasted in the government’s procurement of unusable IT systems? You really don’t want to know.

So the fact that a team has finally found the formula of success, a formula that is better, faster and cheaper than most private sector companies’ efforts, is something to be shouted from the rooftops.

Naming their early efforts ‘alphagov’ you might mistake them for some hoxton-based bunch of cockney start-up geezers. But you’d be wrong. These are the coolest bunch of civil servants that you are likely to meet (remembering, folks, that James Bond is fictional).

It should be noted that there is a long way to go yet. Just as their champion, Martha Lane Fox, created lastminute.com in the first wave of UK-based Internet start-ups, so we should see this as just the first success in the massive job of transforming government.

But for now, heartfelt congratulations to Mike Bracken, Ben Terrett and all at the Government Digital Service not only for an amazing achievement of digital service design but in so doing, showing that design can be taken seriously as an integral part of significant change.